Lifeanon, would you mind pointing me towards the service that provides your bitcoin denominated debit card?
The card I use is the Shift card. They have a partnership with Coinbase that allows you to spend your bitcoin residing in Coinbase using this card. So I just keep my small amount of spending money each month in Coinbase (the rest in a private wallet) so that I can spend my bitcoin just like I would with a checking account. The awesome part is that there are no transaction fees involved. There is a one time $10 fee to purchase the card and then there are $2.50 ATM withdrawal fees (just like about every VISA card out there), but I don't really use it at any ATMs so that is not a big deal. That's it. No annual fee either. The cool thing as well though is that it functions just like any other debit card. So in cases where I'm at the store and pay with the card as "debit", then if the store allows it, I can ask for cash back if I need it. That allows me to instantly turn my bitcoin back into USD cash without paying any conversion/transaction fees at all.
https://www.shiftpayments.com/card/There are a few other bitcoin debit cards out there, but most of them are prepaid cards that store the value on the card in USD as opposed to bitcoin. So you only receive the value of your bitcoin at the time you load the card. I didn't like that approach and most of those have many additional fees to them as well.
I was not going to bring the great depression into this, but yes, Maizeman makes my point quite well. There are advantages to not having a central authority control the money supply (no hyperinflation) but we need to recognize that there are also HUGE disadvantages WRT the business cycle and the ability of a central authority to mitigate downside risks through currency manipulation.
WRT to inflation/deflation, don't get me wrong, I didn't mean to oversimplify the economy down to just the money supply policy alone. There are other factors for sure that come into play when it comes to what contributes to market ups and downs. But the argument that there are outside forces that contribute to the
effective money supply (such as fractional-reserve banking) is hardly an argument against having a decentralized non-manipulated deflationary currency. Any given type of currency isn't going to solve all the woes of a very complex economy.
The thing about bitcoin however isn't that it is necessarily forever static and can't be changed. It is the fact that it is decentralized and gives the power to a majority of its users instead of a powerful minority. In other words, if we got into a situation where the currency itself was what was holding our economy back (again, highly unlikely), then the currency (bitcoin) could only be changed if the benefit of that change received support from the community as a whole. This is where the idea of social good comes from with regards to bitcoin. But as was stated, it is highly unlikely that bitcoin's inherent nature will be the root culprit of any future economic perils and it will be more than likely that other destructive economic forces will be at play. Those other forces could be everything from fractional-reserve banking (that inherently leads to recessions at regular intervals), horrible lending practices, large-scale speculative bubbles, etc.
Finally, for what it is worth (since the depression was thrown out there), economists looked throughout American history and found that, outside of the Great Depression, there is no correlation between depression/recession and deflation (
Atkeson, Andrew and Kehoe, Patrick. Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. Deflation and Depression: Is There an Empirical Link? January 2004). Yes, deflation made what took place with the Great Depression worse, but it wasn't and can't be the cause of it. For example, defaulting loans during an economic hardship can have the same effect as a contracting money supply that presents itself in a recession, but that doesn't mean that the resulting deflationary pattern was a root cause that gave way to that recession. The idea that deflation hinders economic growth is completely baseless.